


it always comes back to this

by AllTheNamesIWantedWereUsed



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst and Feels, Character Death, Destruction, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, Heavy Angst, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 17:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11422623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllTheNamesIWantedWereUsed/pseuds/AllTheNamesIWantedWereUsed
Summary: No matter what, it always comes back to this.That doesn't mean he isn't going to fight like hell to prevent it





	it always comes back to this

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: accidental drug overdose mentioned

It always comes back to this. No matter how many times he goes back to that specific moment, no matter how many times he presses that goddamn button, it always comes back to this.

 

But Richard Strand is nothing if not determined, and so he keeps rewinding. Even if it kills him, he will keep rewinding until he can stop what now feels inevitable.

 

Time travel always seemed impossible, as laughable  as the many TV shows and movies made about it, and yet the device he still has, stolen from the depths of Thomas Warren’s collection of insane machines, proves that perhaps Richard isn’t the one who should be laughing.

 

It reminds him of that stupid movie Charlie used to love, about the man who kept inexplicably reliving the same day over and over, except Richard is in somewhat full control of this situation and his dilemma results in far more tragedy and far less comedy.

 

He has relived the last few years of his life over and over, but it all ends the same way.

 

No matter what, it always ends with a chthonic goddess’s maniacal laughter and Alex Reagan dead on the floor in a pool of blood, her hair soaked in the crimson liquid, her eyes wide and  staring upward, her faithful camcorder still clutched in her stained hand, because even the end of the world needed a firsthand account.  

 

He starts with all that time he spent locked in his office, when he cut himself off from Alex. Instead of tracking Thomas Warren, he takes what he already knows and sets it aside, devotes himself instead to saving lives by preventing the same event that takes Alex, Charlie, Ruby, even Nic (because yes, even Nicodemus Silver deserves saving)  from his world.

 

Every precaution he takes only goes so far. Somewhere, down the line, whatever choices he makes end up being the wrong ones, or are overruled by the others, mostly Alex. There is only so much one man can do, only so many decisions he can influence without revealing the whole truth.

 

Of course, he's tried telling them the truth, many times over. That usually makes it worse and only ushers in everyone's utter destruction even faster.

 

He's lost count of how many times he's gone back, but though he doesn't know it, this now numbers at the 194th time he's unraveled the fabric of his past, determined to weave it into something that is tailored to his benefit and others.

 

“Richard,” Alex says, cutting through his thoughts looking to him to see what decision the group of them should make. He's memorized her monologues, every word she says, so even if he wasn't listening, he definitely was the other times.

 

Shs wants to know whether they fight against Tiamat or not. This decision is monumental, and either way, it always ends badly. He looks at the group in front of him. They look exhausted and defeated, hiding out at one of Coralee's last remaining safe houses. Coralee is long dead, but she left behind all that she could to help.

 

He looks at Nic, and sees the young man gasping on the floor as he bleeds out from a gunshot wound, hears Alex cry out as Nic shouts for them to go, his voice cracking.

 

He looks at Charlie and Ruby, and sees them frozen in midair, faces contorted in fear as Tiamat levels a single, decaying finger at them, hears them scream as she dissolves their beings until they are nothing like the two women he knew only as daughters.

 

He looks at Alex and sees her impaled by a large, broken steel pipe that Tiamat hurls at her with a deadly speed and accuracy, hears her begging him to run in a rasping voice as he kneels down by her side.

 

He can't tell them to fight, but he can't tell them to run. Telling them to fight guarantees their deaths, telling them to run only means Alex's dissonance, later leading to them fighting sooner than needed.

 

He has exhausted just about every possibility, lived through every possible future. It will all end the same way.

 

It would seem that the future he has worked so hard to avoid is a fixed point.

 

Or perhaps he simply hasn't gone back far enough.

 

He asks for a moment alone with Alex, to confer their best options.

 

“You don't know what to do either?” she asks, and he knows how devastating that is for her, because she's always been able to count on him for an answer.

 

He looks at the intrepid journalist he's come to know and...well, love, though he’ll never admit it.

 

“We should fight,” he says quietly, though he has no intention of letting any of them onto the battlefield. He keeps the date of their deaths locked in his head: June 16th, 2018.

 

She nods in agreement. “Okay, I'll let them know-”

 

He takes her by the shoulders. “I wanted to speak with you for a different reason.”

 

She raises an eyebrow. “Okay?”

 

He takes in every last detail of her, desperate to be able to remember her. “I wanted to say goodbye to you, privately,” he says, in case this plan works and he never sees her again.

 

“Goodbye?” she repeats. “Wh-where are you going?”

 

“A place you cannot follow me to,” he replies softly, pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead.

 

She's sputtering, demanding an explanation, but he's already brushed by, heading out to talk to the others.

 

“Nic,” he says, shaking the man's hand, “It's been a pleasure working with you.” Nic only looks confused.

 

“Dad, what is that supposed to mean?” Charlie asks. She only recently started calling him Dad again, and he smiles, thinking that might be the only upside to his plan working.

 

“I have to go, Charlie,” he tells her, pulling her into an uncharacteristic hug.

 

“Go? Go where?” she asks, confusedly returning the hug.

 

“A place where we can't go, apparently,” Alex says from the door. “Richard, what is going on?”

 

“Something I'm afraid I can't explain.” He turns to Ruby, wondering whether or not he'll see her again. Ruby, with her dyed hair and ragged clothes, the only person he has constantly trusted enough to confide in about the device, stares up at him, only somewhat aware of what he's about to do.

 

“Dr. Strand-?”

 

She gets the embrace that is so unlike him as well. “I hope I see you again,” he whispers to her. “I lost a daughter once; I don't want to lose you either.”

 

“What are you doing?” Ruby asks uneasily. He holds up the device.

 

“Everything has a beginning, Ruby,” he says. “I'm going back to mine.”

 

“What is that? Richard, where are you going? Richard!” Alex calls after him as he walks down the hallway with lead in his step, pressing buttons and entering numbers, and he has to pretend he doesn't hear her.

 

He turns around as he starts to fade from their view.

 

“Goodbye,” he says, looking at the group of people in front of him, all that he has anchoring him to this world.

 

And then he's gone, soaring into time and space. He's accustomed to the dizzy feeling now, the way his stomach seems to drop, the way his heart beats fast enough to fly out of his chest.

 

He still has yet to get used to dropping into a certain time, getting his bearings.

 

The first thing he does when he lands is check the date. He knows it well, too well, perhaps. Looking in the mirror, he sees that his features have gone back in time as well. He no longer looks as tired, and the lines creasing the skin around his eyes are gone.

 

He's standing in his old apartment, with its peeling paint and lackluster furniture. This is after Vancouver, three years after Charlie was born, one year after her mother died of a vicious cancer. His grief for Charlie's mother has faded, but remembering this, it wells up again.

 

Charlie is still at her daycare, and he has a very fateful meeting he needs to get to. So he gets in his car, an ancient thing he bought years ago, and drives.

 

He knows the date, and to change what needs to be change is steadily approaching. For now, though, he's lost in nostalgia, remembering how much simpler the world used to be.

 

It's a simple business meeting, but he remembers how one of his colleagues, Andrew Pearson, tried to play matchmaker.

 

He succeeded then, but he won't prevail now.

 

“There's someone I'd like for you to meet,” Andrew says pleasantly, and promptly shows him to a woman with dark hair and hazel eyes, and a laugh that makes the world spin.

 

She introduces herself as Coralee Jacobson, and he can't help but feel a twinge, looking at how much younger and happier she looks. He refrains from thinking about the cult as he shakes her hand.

 

Today is the day he first met Coralee, though now it will be the day that Andrew Pearson tried and failed once more to connect him with someone, though perhaps Andrew was in on the whole thing with Coralee.

 

The thought occurs to him with all the gentleness of an anvil dropped from a skyscraper. After today, he will avoid Andrew’s attempts at matchmaking with a fervent vehemence.

 

Still, as Coralee tries to lure him in, he's reminded of how he fell in love with her in the first place, but knowing what he discovered so long ago, knowing what a future with her will bring, he tamps it down and politely turns down her advances, sees the frustration behind her eyes after every rejection. He reminds himself that their relationship was one built on manipulation, that Coralee had no intention of truly loving him.

 

That thought steels his resolve and cements his future when he tells her that he simply is not interested in a relationship, and that she would be better off looking elsewhere.

 

He doesn’t know where she slinks off to when he finalizes the fact that the two of them will never be anything more than professional.

 

He tries to tell himself that he doesn’t care.

 

He goes through his life with a certain sense of unease, wondering about when everything will fall apart, when time and space rips itself apart to mend what he has broken.

 

But it doesn’t, something that unsettles him even more.

* * *

 

He doesn’t mourn when his father dies as much as he did the first time(granted, he didn’t really mourn the first time either), and when he finds Cheryl near the bathroom, rubbing at her eyes in an attempt to look as though she’d been crying, he’s reminded of all that Coralee broke when she breezed in and out of his life, how all his relationships crumbled, even the more familial ones.

 

He won’t pretend that he’s still bruised by Cheryl’s distance after what happened with Coralee, but he’s got a chance to try again, and God and Tiamat be damned, he’s taking it.

 

He offers to buy Cheryl dinner after the funeral, and they, along with Charlie, too young to perhaps fully understand the gravity of the things they discuss, spend an evening realizing just how little they truly will miss Howard Strand. They schedule another get-together, and Richard takes Charlie home. She falls asleep in the car, her head leaning against the encompassing headrest of her carseat, her black dress making it look as though she’s bathed in shadow, a thought that troubles him.

 

He remembers before, in the other timeline, how he discovered the shadows in her pre-kindergarten graduation picture, how Coralee didn’t understand (though perhaps she only pretended that) why his hands shook or why he threw the picture away. The shadows never hurt him, or Sebastian Torres; surely they wouldn’t hurt her.

 

Sebastian Torres. He isn’t even born yet, but Richard can’t help but worry for the quiet boy he interviewed, telling him in short sentences about his tall shadow friend.

 

Thinking logically, he shouldn’t be worried. The shadows have never hurt anyone they followed, not physically at least.

 

He brushes thoughts of shadows away, willing to cross that bridge when he gets to it.

 

Over the years, he pores over photographs, searching for shadows. He finds them, always out of the way and carefully hidden, but Charlie never mentions a single shadow creature or anything else. She doesn’t withdraw into herself, like he did, but stays happy and smiling, just living as a girl who loves her father. She grows into a strikingly intelligent young woman, successful and carefree.

 

He’ll never figure out what to do about the shadows, but as long as she’s not hurting, he can live with not knowing.

* * *

 

He starts the Strand Institute again, but he’s careful. He starts more slowly this time, writing more books, teaching more classes. Perhaps if he starts later, the timeline will still be different. He keeps the device with him, ready to go back at any time if needed. As meticulous as he is, debunking the paranormal is the majority of all he knows, and it’s all he can rely upon.

 

He doesn't find Ruby on the streets like he did the first time; he doesn’t find her at all. It hurts, of course, to lose the woman who gave him humorous Father’s Day cards and birthday presents, to lose someone who stepped in to be his daughter when he no longer had one.

 

He finds a young man named Peter instead, with glasses, brown doe eyes and constant anxiety. Peter doesn’t dye his hair, and he wears strictly work casual clothes, rather than ripped jeans and rock band T-shirts. Much to Richard’s irritation, Charlie takes to flirting with Peter quite frequently, but finally stops when Peter tells her he’s gay.

 

The fated day comes when Alex Reagan calls, once, twice, eleven times. She leaves a message every time.

 

He tells Peter to delete all the messages, but not before listening to them in a brief moment of weakness.

 

Remembering how she looked lying in a puddle of her own blood is what keeps him from returning those calls.

 

Her podcast, no longer about his collection of Black Tapes (which remain tucked safely on his shelf), but now about “interesting occupations,” still airs. He listens, but never cares about the story.

 

He just wants to hear her voice again.

* * *

 

Nearing the date of the apocalypse, with only a few more months to go, has Richard more on edge. Charlie asks him if he’s feeling well, but he assures her he’s fine and goes back to not sleeping, and feeling too nauseous from stress to eat.

 

June 16th, 2018, passes without a stirring. So does the next day. And the next. He breathes, not a sigh of relief, but a ragged gasping as he locks himself in his office, tormented with visions of Alex, Charlie, Ruby, and Nic, all dying the way they did in the other timeline coupled with a barrage of pain assaulting every nerve in his body. This goes on for days, until he’s in his Chicago apartment, head pounding and tear stains painting his face.

 

Every day that passes after June 16th, 2018, is a day that he lives in agony.

 

Charlie drags him to countless doctors, begging for medical aid, but they can’t help him. All they can do is prescribe an obscene amount of painkillers, too many for his body to handle. He knows what he needs to do to make the pain stop, but that means erasing everything he’s worked so hard to ensure.

 

He tells himself, through gritted teeth, that he is doing this so that the people he cares about can live, so that the world can go on spinning and existing, that it’s either this or torture and death at Tiamat’s hands.

 

The device remains hidden so far deep that no one will ever find it and use it against the world. The people he loves are safe from anyone else’s meddling, so he tells himself, swallowing another painkiller dry, then another, and another, not fully paying attention to what he's doing.

  
That thought comforts him when it all finally ends and he dies next to an empty bottle that used to hold a multitude of the most powerful painkillers modern medicine could provide.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not gonna lie, I hated myself writing this. 
> 
> Anyway, comment/kudos, please!
> 
> Also, can you just think about Alex living her life but everything feels wrong, and then the news talks about Strand's death, and all of a sudden she feels really sad but doesn't know why?


End file.
